PhysicsOverflow
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
PhysicsOverflow is a physics website that serves as a post-publication open peer review[2] platform for research papers in physics, as well as a collaborative blog and online community of physicists. It allows users to ask, answer and comment on graduate-level physics questions, post and review manuscripts from ArXiv (which lists PhysicsOverflow discussion pages among its trackbacks[3]) and other sources, and vote on both forms of content.
 | |
Type of site | Question and answer Open peer review |
|---|---|
| Owner | Roger Cattin[1] |
| Created by | Abhimanyu Pallavi Sudhir, Rahel Knoepfel and Roger Cattin |
| URL | physicsoverflow |
| Commercial | No |
| Registration | Optional |
| Launched | April 2014[2] |
Content license | User contributions under CC BY-SA 3.0[2] |
In addition to the two primary forms of content, the PhysicsOverflow community also welcomes discussions on unsolved problems, and hosts a chat section for discussions on topics generally of interest to physicists and students of physics, such as those related to recent events in physics, physics academia, and the publishing process.[2]
History
PhysicsOverflow was started in April 2014 as a physics-equivalent of MathOverflow by Rahel Knöpfel, a physics PhD at the University of Rostock, high-school student Abhimanyu Pallavi Sudhir, and Roger Cattin, a retired professor of computer science at the University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland.[2] The site was initially a mere question-and-answer forum, as it was started by users dissatisfied by the policies of the Physics Stack Exchange, but it was eventually expanded to include a Reviews section in October 2014.[citation needed]
Moderation practices
PhysicsOverflow is well-known for its liberal moderation policy and hesitation to block contributors except for spam, as reflected in the website's bill of "user rights".[4][5] The content is largely community-moderated, much like MathOverflow, although exceptions have been recorded.[6][7]
Although the site's moderation policy is publicly available as part of the moderator manual, the site has been criticised for the excessive dispersion of policy-related material, such as the FAQ, the Bill of Rights, the moderator list and the Community Moderation threads, leading to reduced transparency.[8][9] In response, the site's administrators posted a bulletin of all moderation-related content on the site on the homepage.
Technical details
PhysicsOverflow runs Question2Answer, an open-source Q&A software, with a custom theme and several plugins and patches.[2] Some of its plugins have been used by other Question2Answer websites, such as the Open Science Q&A and the Physics Problems Q&A.[10][11]
Usage
Quantcast records around 3000 monthly visitors and between 20,000 and 50,000 global page views to PhysicsOverflow every month, over half of whom are located in four countries: the United States (26.8%), India (9.2%), the United Kingdom (8.5%), and Germany (6.4%).[citation needed] However, according to PhysicsOverflow's own data, only around 1500 users actually contribute content to the site, and 440 are active at a given point in time.[12]
Recognition
The creation of PhysicsOverflow was well-received by the MathOverflow community.[13] PhysicsOverflow was also featured at the 5th Offtopicarium[14] and World Scientific's Asia-Pacific Physics News Letter.[15]
- John Baez suggested the website as a platform for discussing research-level physics questions.[16]
- Greg Bernhardt, the founder of Physics Forums, acknowledged the site as a "very interesting development for the physics discussion communities".[17]
- Arnold Neumaier, a professor at the University of Vienna, employs PhysicsOverflow as the platform for discussion about his Theoretical Physics FAQ.[18]
- String theorist Lubos Motl referred to the website as a "very promising competition [to Physics Stack Exchange]".[19]
- Urs Schreiber publicised the site, claiming it could act as a catalyst to make physics academia more open like mathematics.[20]
See also
References
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